House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Ambivalence. On the one hand, I was endlessly fascinated by Baker’s easy and surprising inventiveness in House of Holes. On the other hand, I don’t think I would have missed a thing if I had never read this book. And yet, to know that I would not have missed anything requires me to have read what I would have missed. I don’t want to suggest that I regret reading it—it was over too fast for it to have been much of a waste of time. And it’s not like my time’s all that important anyway.
Why to women and men jill and jack off? To assuage sexual urges, certainly, but sometimes, other times, because they’re bored, nothing meaningful to do. We are, at our very cores, being designed to want to have sex, and in our hyper-modern world, that urge has been sublimated a thousand different ways. So this book is just a kind of bored act of jerking off for Baker, I guess.
Language, too is integral to our identity as humans. We’re born to it. Baker, here, mixes the two. He’s undoubtedly talented with the written word. So I guess, in as much as I would rather see some people jill off over others, because they’re beautiful or good at it or seem to just do it so well, so too would I rather read Baker’s wording-off over some other author.
But, as I said, the novel’s more or less meaningless. House of Holes has no spirit, no soul, no substance. It is indeed a hole, a thing defined by what it isn’t. I am not trying to be all metaphysical and deep here, not saying that there’s a message in a Baker’s magico-porn. It’s just a tug-book for your Broca area.
Take it or leave it.